Arria V GZ Avalon-MM Interface for PCIe Solutions: User Guide

ID 723696
Date 5/21/2017
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.1. Arria® V GZ Avalon-MM Interface for PCIe Datasheet

Arria® V GZ FPGAs include a configurable, hardened protocol stack for PCI Express that is compliant with PCI Express Base Specification 2.1 or 3.0.

The Hard IP for PCI Express IP core using the Avalon® Memory-Mapped (Avalon-MM) interface removes some of the complexities associated with the PCIe* protocol. For example, it handles all of the Transaction Layer Packet (TLP) encoding and decoding. Consequently, you can complete your design more quickly. The Avalon-MM interface is implemented as a bridge in soft logic. It is available in Platform Designer.

Figure 1.  Arria® V GZ PCIe Variant with Avalon-MM InterfaceThe following figure shows the high-level modules and connecting interfaces for this variant.
The following table shows the aggregate bandwidth of a PCI Express link for Gen1, Gen2, and Gen3 for 1, 2, 4, and 8 lanes. The protocol specifies 2.5 giga-transfers per second for Gen1, 5.0 giga-transfers per second for Gen2, and 8.0 giga‑transfers per second for Gen3. This table provides bandwidths for a single transmit (TX) or receive (RX) channel. The numbers double for duplex operation. Gen1 and Gen2 use 8B/10B encoding which introduces a 20% overhead. In contrast, Gen3 uses 128b/130b encoding which reduces the data throughput lost to encoding to about 1.5%.
Note: Intel® Cyclone® 10 GX support up to Gen2 x4 configurations.
Table 1.  PCI Express Data Throughput
Link Bandwidth in Gigabits Per Second (Gbps)
x1 x2 x4 x8

PCI Express Gen1 (2.5 Gbps)

2

4

8

16

PCI Express Gen2 (5.0 Gbps)

4

8

16

32

PCI Express Gen3 (8.0 Gbps)

7.87

15.75

31.5

63

Refer to AN 456: PCI Express High Performance Reference Design for more information about calculating bandwidth for the hard IP implementation of PCI Express in many Intel FPGAs.